An article on psychopathy in society appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week, and will be of interest to some here. It is an excerpt from a new book entitled The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton. The article is too long to post in its entirety here so I will just link to it and include a few key quotes. It starts out talking about research that is indicating that society is becoming more psychopathic and less empathetic over recent decades (since the study began in 1979 at least), and likely causes for this. Perhaps most relavent for this forum is that after this introduction the author discusses the positive aspects of psychopathy for certain endeavours such as combat, and he provides an entertaining description of where he and a special forces veteran submit to a brain activity test while watching disturbing images. The entire article should be read to get all the context and nuances, it ties in well to previous discussions here on the psychological aspects of combat and self-defense.

But if society really is becoming more psychopathic, it's not all doom and gloom. In the right context, certain psychopathic characteristics can actually be very constructive. A neurosurgeon I spoke with (who rated high on the psychopathic spectrum) described the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation as "an intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses." In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment. Individuals like my old friend Andy McNab.

McNab was arguably the most famous British soldier to have served in Her Majesty's Armed Forces until Prince Harry hung up his polo mallet at Eton. During the first Gulf War, Andy commanded Bravo Two Zero, an eight-man Special Forces patrol that was assigned the task of gathering intelligence on underground communication links between Baghdad and northwest Iraq, and tracking and destroying Scud missile launchers along the Iraqi main supply route in the area.

But soon the boys had other fish to fry. A couple of days after insertion, the patrol was compromised by a goatherd. And, in time-honored fashion, they beat it: 185 miles, across the desert, toward the Syrian border.

Only one of them made it. Three were killed, and the other four, including Andy, were picked up at various points along the way by the Iraqis. Suffice it to say that none of their captors were ever going to have their own talk shows ... or make their mark in the annals of cosmetic surgery. It's generally accepted that there are better ways of putting a person at ease than by stubbing your cigarette out on his neck. And better ways of breaking and remodeling their jawline than with the sun-baked butt of an AK-47. Thanks to more-advanced techniques back home in Britain, Andy's mouth now packs more porcelain than all the bathrooms in Buckingham Palace put together. He should know. In 1991 he went there to collect the Distinguished Service Medal from the queen.

Such mental toughness isn't the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There's also fearlessness. A couple of years ago, on a beautiful spring morning 12,000 feet above Sydney's Bondi Beach, I performed my first free-fall sky dive. The night before, somewhat the worse for wear in one of the city's waterfront bars, I texted Andy for some last-minute advice.

"Keep your eyes open. And your arse shut," came the reply.

I did. Just. But performing the same feat at night, in the theater of war, over a raging ocean from twice the altitude and carrying 200 pounds of equipment, is a completely different ballgame. And if that's not enough, "We used to have a laugh," Andy recalls. "Mess about. You know, we'd throw the equipment out ahead of us and see if we could catch up with it. Or on the way down, we'd grab each other from behind in a bear hug and play chicken—see who'd be the first to peel off and pull the cord. It was all good fun."

Er, right. If you say so, Andy. But what wasn't much fun was the killing. I ask Andy whether he ever felt any regret over anything he'd done. Over the lives he'd taken on his numerous secret missions around the world.

"No," he replies matter-of-factly, his arctic-blue eyes showing not the slightest trace of emotion. "You seriously don't think twice about it. When you're in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you've done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16.

And then some key aspects of the description of the test.

"OK," says Nick. "Listen up. Right now, on the screen in front of you, you can see a tranquil, restful scene, which is presently being accompanied by quiet, relaxing music. This is to establish baseline physiological readings from which we can measure subsequent arousal levels.

"But at an undisclosed moment sometime within the next 60 seconds, the image you see at the present time will change, and images of a different nature will appear on the screen. These images will be violent. And nauseating. And of a graphic and disturbing nature.

"As you view these images, changes in your heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG activity will be monitored and compared with the resting levels that are currently being recorded. Any questions?"

Andy and I shake our heads.

"Happy?"

We nod.

"OK," says Nick. "Let's get the show on the road."

He disappears behind us, leaving Andy and me merrily soaking up the incontinence ad. Results reveal later that, at this point, as we wait for something to happen, our physiological output readings are actually pretty similar. Our pulse rates are significantly higher than our normal resting levels, in anticipation of what's to come.

But with the change of scene, an override switch flips somewhere in Andy's brain. And the ice-cold Special Forces soldier suddenly swings into action. As vivid, florid images of dismemberment, mutilation, torture, and execution flash up on the screen in front of us (so vivid, in fact, that Andy later confesses to actually being able to "smell" the blood: a "kind of sickly-sweet smell that you never, ever forget"), accompanied not by the ambient spa music of before but by blaring sirens and hissing white noise, his physiological readings start slipping into reverse. His pulse rate begins to slow. His GSR begins to drop, his EEG to quickly and dramatically attenuate. In fact, by the time the show is over, all three of Andy's physiological output measures are pooling below his baseline.

Nick has seen nothing like it. "It's almost as if he was gearing himself up for the challenge," he says. "And then, when the challenge eventually presented itself, his brain suddenly responded by injecting liquid nitrogen into his veins. Suddenly implemented a blanket neural cull of all surplus feral emotion. Suddenly locked down into a hypnotically deep code red of extreme and ruthless focus."

He shakes his head, nonplused. "If I hadn't recorded those readings myself, I'm not sure I would have believed them," he continues. "OK, I've never tested Special Forces before. And maybe you'd expect a slight attenuation in response. But this guy was in total and utter control of the situation. So tuned in, it looked like he'd completely tuned out."

My physiological output readings, in contrast, went through the roof. Exactly like Andy's, they were well above baseline as I'd waited for the carnage to commence. But that's where the similarity ended. Rather than go down in the heat of battle, in the midst of the blood and guts, mine had appreciated exponentially.

"At least it shows that the equipment is working properly," comments Nick. "And that you're a normal human being."

We look across at Andy, who's chatting up a bunch of Nick's Ph.D. students over by a bank of monitors. God knows what they make of him. They've just analyzed his data, and the electrode gel has done such a number on his hair that he looks like Don King in a wind tunnel.

All done, Andy is off to a luxury hotel in the country, where I'll be joining him later for a debrief. But that's only after I've run the gantlet again, in Phase II of the experiment. In which, with the aid of a psychopath makeover, I'll have another go at the experiment, only this time with a completely different head on—thanks to a dose of TMS.

In Phase II they temporarily and artificially bring out a bit of the fearless psychopath in author, which makes for a humorous read.

So is this one of the secrets of the martial-arts masters of old (from any part of the world), they had a high psychopathic ranking? If so then the question becomes, for those of us who might be 'normal human beings', how do we tap into this useful psychopath when needed? Or are we just doomed to becoming statistics that the psychopathic survivors reflect on briefly during moments of remembrance?

One thing that bugs me is the fact that you sometimes get no respect from your immediate peers, in spite of your academic training and publications. A very smart boss of mine once said "An expert is someone from out of town with slides." This Yale P-chem grad with the UVa MD and a father with a chaired professorship at Darden understood the phenomenon in a company where management can get enamored by outsiders who come in and preach stuff. He was hyper smart. I could tell... And I understood his point.

I've tried to explain to folks first getting the relationship between facing The Grim Reaper and neurohormonal stimulation that Nature loves variability. While there are strong tendencies and you should teach the tendencies, there are exceptions to the general rule. When you have a guy like this who clearly can get his brain in the right place when things go down, you have a very capable and dangerous warrior.

I've been blessed (sort of) with a familial tremor. I taught myself to do open heart surgery in spite of it. It turned out to be a fantastic biofeedback mechanism. Over time when things got down, I noticed that an eerie calm would come over me. The anecdote studied in this article confirms what I suspected - that some fighters can go right to that mental sweet spot.

My only question is... can you package it and teach it? I think you can. I think a rare few have unusual talents, and a good chunk of the rest of us can use "moving meditation" and scenario training to get better at it.

After having read Grossman's book On Killing, I recall having a conversation with Rory Miller at camp. Usually Rory is right there with most of the modern Reality-Based Self-Defense (RBSD) "experts" and modern day gurus. But there was an aspect of Grossman's book that he did not like.

In his first book, Grossman teaches us that most (~85%) do not have the capacity to kill without operant conditioning. And then when that operant conditioning is applied and we send our men and women off to kill in war, many of those suffer later from PTSD when their pre-wired brains rebel against that conditioning. Vietnam is the prototype for everything that can go wrong when training our warriors to fight. More people died from suicide than from bullets and bombs in combat.

Meanwhile, Grossman teaches us that this 15% can be found in large numbers living behind the walls of maximum security prisons. These are people who can slit your throat, and then go eat a cheeseburger. Violence doesn't register with them the same way it does with "normal" people.

Rory took exception to this characterization. Rory faced bad guys on a daily basis in prisons, and taught others to deal with these bad guys. By Grossman's account, Rory felt he was being labeled as defective and psychopathic. If you take the book Glenn is referring to (The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success), you begin to see his point. Is Rory - a man constantly fighting for good - a psychopath? He didn't think so. He's here protecting society, and "experts" are calling him a noxious defect.

In Grossman's second book (On Combat), he makes an important distinction. He labels the 85% as sheep. And the remaining 15%? He dichotomizes them into wolves and sheepdogs. The incarcerated that Rory kept in line were the wolves, and Rory was the sheepdog. No, Rory isn't a defect. If anything, he's a rare and gifted individual who can willfully put his empathy wiring on pause and take a walk on the dark side - all in the name of good. It is an ability that few understand. It is a calling that keeps the sheep safe.

I don't like this term psychopath. It implies that the gifted among us are diseased. They are not. They are precious and they are necessary in a civil society.

Bill Glasheen wrote:One thing that bugs me is the fact that you sometimes get no respect from your immediate peers, in spite of your academic training and publications. A very smart boss of mine once said "An expert is someone from out of town with slides." This Yale P-chem grad with the UVa MD and a father with a chaired professorship at Darden understood the phenomenon in a company where management can get enamored by outsiders who come in and preach stuff. He was hyper smart. I could tell... And I understood his point.

I believe this phenomenon boils down to cost justification, particularly among management. If your company drops a few grand to bring in a speaker, more to bring in a consultant, and especially if you are the one signing off on those expenses, then by default that person IS telling you something that your own company's employees are not.

Now with you it's different, we just enjoy giving you a hard time. Think of it as more of a sibling relationship rather than peer, and siblings apparently* HAVE to heckle, argue, and fight with each other. We'll just blame it on Papa George being too lax and not keeping us in line.

(* Disclaimer: I must admit that being an only child I missed out on this whole sibling relationship thing growing up, and do not understand why my three kids insist on antagonizing each other so much...they do not act like the TV sit-com siblings I grew up with at all! And why do the "What to Expect" books stop at the toddler years?!)

Last edited by Glenn on Thu Nov 01, 2012 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't like this term psychopath. It implies that the gifted among us are diseased. They are not. They are precious and they are necessary in a civil society.

I agree, I am not fond of the way they are applying psychopath here either, although at least they are constructing a ranking so presumably(?) the professionals like Andy (from the article) and Rory would not rank as high as a disfunctional psychopath inmate in prison. I think a missing component here is sociopathy, and when reading the article I was trying to differentiate their use of psychopath from the concepts of psychopath versus sociopath that I have learned. To me they seem to be trying to wrap up both conditions together in one index and call it psychopathy, but since there was no discussion at all of sociopathy (maybe it is in the book) I cannot be sure. Andy (and maybe Rory?) may rank relatively high on these researchers' pschopath index but low on some sort of sociopath index, meanwhile your cheeseburger-loving throat-slitter in prison would likely rank high in both. To me it is the sociopathic aspect that really makes the difference, it's what separates the good guys from the bad guys.

The other factor is that classifying such people as psychopathic, with its inherent implications of being deviant, diseased, or otherwise abnormal, is historically contextual. At one time, and not too long ago at that, people such as Andy and Rory were considered the normal ones. Cultural groups needed them to survive the constant dangers, and anyone not like them would have been seen as abnormal (and probably useless predator/invader fodder). In our mega-societies of today we often lose sight of what behaviors are still needed to keep the proverbial wolves at bay.

Glenn wrote:Now with you it's different, we just enjoy giving you a hard time.

My post was not about you, Glenn. You missed the mark here.

This subject has history - much longer than your presence on these boards. Many "experts" have weighed in on physiology during life-threatening encounters - experts who have no clinical training. These experts are then quoted by other experts. Before you know it, you have a freaking mess being passed on as fact. Then it takes another generation to untie the Gordian knot.

The subject is not that complicated. But it takes a minimum threshold amount of academic training to get some of the basic concepts at an intuitive level. An understanding of those basic concepts doesn't make you an expert in RBSD. But it does help you shape your core principles of training.

Oh I didn't assume it was about me, I've seen enough of your comments/debates on this topic to know what you were talking about. I've been participating in these forums and their predecessors like George's mailbag since the mid-1990s and am well aware this issue goes back before then. That is why I started this thread, because I knew you in particular would appreciate it and be able to add to it.

No my comments were just continuing to give you a hard time, and hit the intended bullseye

Although only averaging about five hours of sleep a night lately (about 3.5 years), I make no claims to having sound judgement or coherence with anything I post

Quote"One thing that bugs me is the fact that you sometimes get no respect from your immediate peers, in spite of your academic training and publications. A very smart boss of mine once said "An expert is someone from out of town with slides." This Yale P-chem grad with the UVa MD and a father with a chaired professorship at Darden understood the phenomenon in a company where management can get enamored by outsiders who come in and preach stuff. He was hyper smart. I could tell... And I understood his point."

personnaly Bill I never doubted what you said ever, even when you were none committal as in " one touch knockouts".......I've got that on preorder with Amazon, when you decide to write it"

Not trying to toot my own horn. I know it comes across badly. But there's so much bad information out there, that we need good minds and strong evidence to make sense of things.

It pays to read and visit and listen and experiment. But at the end of the day, we all need to sit back and try to make sense of it all. Understanding the strength of evidence is key. For a long time, folks in martial arts and self-defense have relied on "expert opinion" alone. In the world of science, that and a few bucks will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. While it's difficult to do and find good research work, that is happening piecemeal in martial arts. Joseph LeDoux is a good example of an academic who has helped us all understand the concept of fear.

As a person who deals with tens of millions of rows of data every day, I have a strong sense of how the real world works. The real world has tendencies, and the real world operates on principles and laws. But as I've said before, Nature loves variability and some degree of unpredictability. If it weren't for that, species would not survive. If the wolf always knew which way the rabbit was going to jump, then it would eat itself out of a food supply.

My beef is with people who use words like "always". What makes our world interesting is that "always" isn't. And when it isn't, there's often something worth learning. The body of work Glenn just cited is a great example.

Yes BillI totally agree with you I have a slightly similar experince. My job used to be working for the Crown Prosecution service, I had 23 years working with them. The last 10 of which were at various police stations working with police officers. I had access to information about crime that the general public never get to see, as a martial artist it was a great resource to have. Now you'll get folks telling you stuff like a fight always goes to the ground etc ( especially with the popularity of MMA ),or what the most common attacks are, or that you'll always get cut in a knife fight, but how do they know this? they just don't have access to that information. I am no expert but I at least have an "informed" opinion ,

Bill Glasheen wrote:As a person who deals with tens of millions of rows of data every day, I have a strong sense of how the real world works. The real world has tendencies, and the real world operates on principles and laws.

I see it too in my realm of spatial modeling and geographic information systems (GIS), but my world is full of qualitative and especially post-modern minded researchers who argue that our positivist methods and quantitative data reveal nothing of the real world. Peers really can be some of the strongest critics.

Speaking of martial artists with physiology and clinical training, there is an exercise physiology professor here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Dr. Richard Schmidt, who also has a Rokkudan in Shotokan, a Yondan in Kendo, a Godan in Iaido, and a Nidan in Naginata. He teaches courses such as Exercise Physiology, Exercise Testing, Clinical Exercise Physiology, and Functional Electrocardiography, as well as teaching martial arts at the university, and has combined those interests by conducting research on law enforcement officers and martial artists with regards to exercise physiology and physical fitness modeling. I think you'd appreciate some of the publications in his vita Bill.Richard J. SchmidtI have met him a couple of times when he has visited Dave's class with some of his students, and not surprisingly I appreciate his scientific approach to the martial arts.

Glenn wrote:my world is full of qualitative and especially post-modern minded researchers who argue that our positivist methods and quantitative data reveal nothing of the real world.

Those kinds of mathematically challenged folks don't survive in private enterprise. Bottom line data have a way of affecting minor things like profit.

I am blessed in that I work in an area where - as long as I follow the scientific method and let the data to the talking - they listen to me. There is most definitely an art to what I do. Many don't have the training and intellect to do inferential rather than descriptive statistical work. But when the knowledge, the tools, the data, and an interesting problem all converge, a good scientist with an ability to communicate can get a captive audience. I've literally saved millions in the last year by doing complex analyses that yielded the most stupid-simple conclusions.

More often I am the bearer of bad news. But again... they listen to me. If they try something "brilliant" and my data say it didn't do jack, well they won't spend buckets of money doing it again. THAT is the "real world" that the math-averse, qualitative theorists will never appreciate.

By a strange coincidence I had taken that book out of the library, and read a little of it, but found it dry and uninteresting, far,far too many quotes and he jumped to far too many conclussions, which were actually the way he thought of things and not necessarily the way other people think of things.Now experts are fine and dandy on two occasions, one is when they are necessary and the other is when they are relevant. In a self defence situation if I were attacked I would not be concerned if the guy was a psychopath or a paranoid schizophrenic I'd just be concerned for my safety. The thing that I don't like about experts in any field is that if they make really,really bad judgements they are not held accountable and they are still regarded as experts ( I'm thinking about the economy here, the US and the UK have similar problems). Now staying with the economy a little , one expert that I listend to said that the problem was that economists thought of themselves as scientists, when they were not . but maybe I am being naive too big to fail, and too big to gaol One case that I remember was a shoplifter getting caught by security ,he had his three year old daughter on his shoulders, so he threw the child at the security guard to make his escape. I don't know if he would be classed as a psychopath, but it sure makes you think. BTW did you watch that link that I posted.those three guys picking on the Iceman, a really bad judgement call or maybe karma

jorvik wrote:one expert that I listend to said that the problem was that economists thought of themselves as scientists, when they were not .

Egad, you actually listened to an expert...don't you know how dangerous that is?!?!

Economists are social scientists, in the same boat as political scientists, sociologists, etc in trying to explain group behavior. Economists are scientists to the extent that incorporating the scientific method and statistical/mathematical (what economists call econometric) modeling makes them scientific, but like other social scientists they are lucky if their regression models can account for as much as 60% of variability in their dependent variable and thus their models have very limited explanatory and (even less) predictive ability. Just as Bill mentioned with his hungry-wolf ecological example, there is enough variability and unpredictibility in social behavior to warrant cautionary disclaimers on the models developed. In the economics courses I have taken they talk about economics being truly predictive only in very limited circumstances.

It may be this aspect that the person you were listening to was focusing on, because it differs from the generally better explanatory/predictive ability of the physical sciences. Astronomers can predict exactly where a Mars will appear in the night sky on July 14, 2153 and when Halley's comet will return. Physicists can tell you the exact energy yield of an explosion given a certain mixture of component ingredients. Economists cannot predict with very much certainty whether the economy will be up or down next Wednesday and political scientists cannot predict with much certainty who will win the election tomorrow. As a result some see the physical ("hard") sciences as the only true sciences with the only true scientists. Pick up any "History of Science" book for example, it is a safe bet that the history of social sciences will not be included.

Those of us in the social sciences take offense at this of course. And given the nature of physics theories these days I think the boundary between "hard" and "soft" sciences has gotten a lot grayer. Heck, I think some of the models I work with probably explain/predict better than string theory...and I could probably prove that if I truly understood string theory!

Maybe that is the difference...the likelihood of an endeavor being a "science" is inversely proportional to the number of people who understand it.